An undercover conservative in SFO

As a progressive living in Virginia (albeit, bluish Northern Virginia), I agree with the sense of religiosity. I can talk about church with my conservative friends much more easily then my progressive friends. I also remember the first time I went outside the Beltway to a meeting of non-religious, public interest types. The meeting started with a prayer. I was taken aback, but once I got over my shock, I found it refreshing.

The other advice is wallow in the economic goodness of conservatism. While I'd be happier to pay more taxes if it meant more government services, I also enjoy living in a relatively low-tax state which still somehow has efficient government and good schools. When friends in DC and Maryland start complaining about Virginia, I just point to low taxes and economic responsibility and overlook my legislature's overriding fascination with abortion and gays.

maria- "Wouldn't it be more honest just to put on a condome and admit onself completely responsible for the decision not to have children, instead of keeping some false visibility of opennes to procreation, and isn't it bad for psychical health when spouses avoid each other all the time except several chosen days?"

It would certainly be a lot easier. Honesty is another thing.

It is always much easier to take the blue pill than the red pill.

Peace

John-"Much simpler to have a vasectomy."

An ancient cosmic proverb: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

maria-"abstinence during Lent is just a good folk tradition in our country, not obligation imposed by church."

I heard about such traditions. There is also something about a tradition of menstruating women refraining from Eucharist until bleeding stops, or so I am told. I think question is whether new folk traditions can be nurtured in our day in time!

I propose a great new Greek folk tradition: Couples becoming more or less latex-free after 10 years of marriage and hopefully some children by using NFP.

With this new folk tradition there will continue to be a Greece as you generally know it a century from now. Otherwise Greece is like the rest of the developed word unconsciously walking into a death trap.

John E., vasectomy is horrible idea. This whole theme is very unromantic, sorry for divagation in previous post.
And what is "red"? I guess it's not communist, does it mean conservative or religious, or conservative and religious?
Which state is the bluest in America (if blue means liberal atheist)? Is Oregon bluer than New York? If anyone has time to answer...

*grin* Red= Commie?

I'm not sure, and someone will probably look it up, when the convention started.. But in election results, entire states are said to go for one candidate or the other. The Democratic candidate or the Republican one. And it became standard to show Democratic states in blue, and Republican states in Red. (Flag colors, you know.)

Some states consistently vote, as a majority, for one party or the other. They get called 'Red states' (Republican) or 'Blue States' (Democratic).

And from there.. a bunch of generalizations spring based on party platform, political philosophy, and geography.

Hope that helps a little.

In short.. Red= Republican/Conservative, Blue= Democratic/Liberal.

Old Susan, I think anti-gay ideas are sometimes products of a theoretical/theological/cultural hothouse in which people talk only to likeminded people, insulated from actual gays.

john, your post supports a theory of mine.

Back in the day, when being a homosexual could get you killed (not that this kind of thing doesn't still happen, but it's becoming thank God increasingly rare) pretty much the only gays who were "out" were the ones who were such freaks that they couldn't very well conceal it. (All populations have freaks, including this one.) So a lot of people got the idea, which seemed valid on the evidence, that all homosexuals are freaks.

Now it turns out, lo and behold, that there was an entire submerged population, the vast majority in fact, of homosexuals who were and are perfectly normal people of whom you would never guess they were different from the average in any way. My next door neighbors Brad and Jeff are like that. If you met either of them in any context whatever they'd strike you as being entirely ordinary, which they are (except that Jeff in particular is unusually bright). Now these people too are "coming out of the closet" in huge numbers and getting married (where possible) and having families and jobs and front yards and going to school events, just like everyone else. My theory is that this changes the social situation around this issue quite a bit.

I don't know that having a couple of feathered-and-mascara-ed oddly talking cross-dressing male freaks living next door wouldn't shake me up a bit (though I do try not to force everyone to be Just Like Me). Perhaps the people on this blog and elsewhere who only know gays from newspaper pictures of the strangest of the weirdos who show up on Gay Pride Day (newspaper photographers, true to their trade, tend to take pictures of the weirdest thing going in any given situation - who wants to see "earthquake" pictures of buildings that weren't damaged, for example, even if that's the vast majority?) think that all homosexuals are like that.

I'm not saying that we don't owe respect to the "freaks" of whatever sort in our midst. (The seriously disabled and the mentally retarded come to mind in this connection - anyone who's "different" for any reason, really. These people too were given a hard time, back in the day.) Of course we do. For Christians, every one of them of whatever condition is a brother or sister for whom Christ died.

But perhaps it's easier for people like me, who have other experiences than a televised freak show, to understand that being a homosexual, being in a stable relationship, having a family, are not unusual, nor is there anything there to be upset about.

rombald: I'm not sure, and someone will probably look it up, when the convention started.

I seem to remember from the 2000 election that the red state/conservative vs. blue state/liberal color choices came from war game simulations, where blue represents the home nation (the "good guys") and red the opponents (i.e. "the bad guys.")

mdavid, with all due respect, we don't need a lot of new people in California right now, so if you're not here, stay where you are, and if we're not reproducing fast enough for you, well, stay where you are.

California's population is exploding, so don't start worrying about us dying out.

We're running out of water to support the population we have, let alone the population we're projected to have in 5 years. People like me (4 kids) and Brad and Jeff next door (2 kids) and Kathy and Dora down the street (4 kids) are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Not to mention the other straight couples on the street. Not to mention immigration, legal and otherwise.

Have kids, mdavid, and enjoy. I don't know where you live. I hope there's room enough and food enough and water enough for everyone. And if you want to scorn your gay neighbors and hold them in contempt, in violation of the Second Great Commandment (I don't remember whether you're a Christian or not), enjoy that too. Also be sure to enjoy the idea that your "clever" God is always on your side.

(PS Seattle is experiencing exploding growth, and I don't mean dogs. I wouldn't have the place as a gift - the weather - but I'm apparently in a minority of some kind.)

I think fertility awareness and ecological breastfeeding are great--the latter because many mother/child duos thrive on it, and the former because every woman deserves to understand and enjoy what is going on with her own body. I think it would be a mistake to expect either of them to prevent pregnancy. Just speaking from experience here. ; )

A propos of nothing much, it does kind of crack me up that we can solemnly discuss these processes in the abstract, but I couldn't describe either one of them here without causing at least a few calls for the smelling salts. Because there are warm fluids and tender pink bits involved, and, er, women touching themselves and stuff.

mdavid: I find your belief in procreation-above-all difficult to square with your hostility to lesbianism. Assuming that you are against captive marriage and rape in marriage (please correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption), then you presumably think lesbians should stay celibate. Why is it that preferable, in terms of maximised reproduction rates, to them marrying (or "marrying") and having children by AI?

andy's right, and in a lot of ways it's too bad for the City of San Francisco. Call me nostalgic, OK.

There are a lot of factors. The City is now ungodly expensive if you need space for a family. The public schools are pretty much a mess, which means private school if you can afford it, and that means, even more money. Our first two kids were born while we were living in a beat-up old Victorian in San Francisco (long ago) but of course we moved out with them at the first available opportunity. Now, only the very rich and the very poor, by and large, have kids in the City. (The very rich, being usually also very old, don't often have little kids.)

In fact, almost the only neighborhoods in SF with a lot of kids are Chinatown (poverty), the Tenderloin (poverty), Hunter's Point and environs (more of the same) and the Castro District (the "gayby boom"). As for this last, apparently a lot of gay families are lingering around for a bit; I suspect, though, that they'll end up moving out to the burbs too, for the same reasons everyone else does.

Sigh. I'm remembering SF back in the day, when there were tons of us in our early 20's with no money and a bunch of babies. The arts (artists tend to be poor) flourished, there was a lot of energy in the City that's missing now. It was a lot of fun, a great time to be young. But it's not the gays who changed that, it's economics.

As for the present (as we move back to reality here, sigh), I don't quite get mdavid's desire to see even MORE people in the City of San Francisco than we have already. (WHY?) Housing prices are sky-high, which means, too many people not enough housing units. Why it would be wonderful if all these people had loads of kids and jammed them into those little apartments is completely beyond me. (Where would they play outside? Would they play outside? Where would they go to school?) And why the gays, who are having families in the City, would be responsible for this (largely imaginary) problem is even more mysterious.

rombald too brings up a good point. Lesbian couples tend to have children, usually several, since both members of the couple can bear them, and often both members want to. If reproduction is good, this should be good, yes?

This breastfeeding thing on the Coasts can have funny results.

I breastfed all my babies. The first two, born in 1968 and 1970, were breastfed against the opposition of my father, who said, repressively, "very few can succeed." (I was 22. I said, "Daddy, if 'very few' could succeed, we'd none of us be here.") (Then, when it worked out, he went around to all his grandfather buddies and proclaimed that all the virtues of these children were to be attributed to "natural feeding," just as though he had invented it!)

So now it's 2001, and the second of these babies (who of course saw her younger sibs breastfed) is about to have her own baby. She (the mom) grew up in the hippie culture of the SF Bay area, and she's never even seen a baby bottle-fed in her entire life. She's only dimly aware that this is possible.

But. She's in Scotland. And Scottish National Health is pushing breastfeeding for medical reasons, and she's in a class with a bunch of other expectant moms, and the question is, "Has anyone here ever seen a baby breastfed?"

My daughter alone raised her hand, thinking, "there's some other way to do it?"

They made her a tutor. Apparently there was some resistance. She's like, what? What's the problem here? :)

andy, I think mdavid is interpreting the statistics wrong. If San Francisco has a low birthrate, it isn't because of the homosexual population (still a rather small percentage) or any sort of anti-reproduction bias. It's because practically everyone in SF is under 30 and still looking for a partner.

First, what I said was that there is a large correlation between pro-gay communitites and lack children. I said nothing about the effect of the "homosexual population" nor "anti-reproducation bias" (whatever that is). Read my post.

Second, you are simply wrong. Here are SF demographics (Census 2000, age):

0-5 4%
5-9 4%
10-14 4%
---- 12% too young to breed ----

14-19 4%
20-24 7%
25-34 23%
35-44 17%
----- 51% breeding age --------

45-54 14%
55-59 5%
60-64 4%
65-74 7%
75-84 5%
85+ 2%
----- 37% too old to breed ----

This puts 47% of the SF population smack dab in the high-breeding sweet spot (age 25-44, note the average age for having a first child in America is 25). So looking only at age (as you do) SF should be a land of high-breeders. And what do we see?

Rather, they have very, very few children. Less than 16% of humans in this city are under 18. It's like an anti-child law or some baby-killing disease wiped them all out - what should be call it, Libola? Kills children on sight? Opps, or before sight (not everyone uses the ultrasound). Yet have no fear: this baby gap is being nicely filled in by old fogeys and toy poodles. The good life. Kids need not apply.

I make no analysis as to why pro-gay people have few kids, but to claim that I'm "interpreting the statistics wrong" in one breath while saying the 18-30 age group there (20%!) is "everyone"...well, let's just say I wanna smoke some of your juicy SF ganja. Share the stash. Sadly, my feet are firmly on the ground.

Oh this too. 2000 and 2008 are horses of very different colors. Do the words "housing price boom" mean anything to you?

Try sticking to talking about things you know something about.

Less than 16% of humans in this city are under 18.

In an age-balanced community at perfect replacement, that number would be about 20-22%. So people have about 70% of that- 1.5 children per middle aged family group. Gee, sure sounds like the Collapse of Civilization.

If I were you, I'd worry a lot more about the graph in the center of the page here-

http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdateNarrow&BarnaUpdateID=280

As pointed out in the Barna Update related to atheists and agnostics, this is not a passing fad wherein young people will become "more Christian" as they grow up. While Christianity remains the typical experience and most common faith in America, a fundamental recalibration is occurring within the spiritual allegiance of America’s upcoming generations.

Old Susan,

2000 and 2008 are horses of very different colors. Do the words "housing price boom" mean anything to you?

If you look at 2006 and even more recent data, you can see there have been no major demographic changes. I use 2000 data because it's easier. And if you think the latest housing market had some big impact on child demographics in SF, you need to walk around and educate yourself, since you can't have a good grip on reality in the city.

you think we need more people in the City why exactly?

I never said anything like this. Why do you liberals always need to put words in people's mouths? It's a disease. Libola II.

Have you even the dimmest awareness of how much money we're talking about here?

If you have a single fact I've said that's incorrect, fire away. Otherwise, I can assure you I can read the housing data in SF far better than you, since you seem to think the housing market in 2008 had some massive impact on child demographics in SF. Words fail.

Try sticking to talking about things you know something about.

I do. Do you have any idea how silly you (allong with Jullian and John E) sound, straining and flailing away like this at straw men? Summon some courage and try some intellectual honesty, addressing points as they are written. The truth will set you free.

I think he lives in Alaska, Susan. Which makes a lot of sense.

Good to see you, too, Susan. I just had the eleven staples removed from my surgical incision, so I'm feeling very frisky. I gimped out to the back yard and watered my tomato plants. After that I had to recline, with a stack of pillows on top of me, and upon that, my laptop. Not really frisky quite yet, except in cyberspace! ; )

Not being a jerk is often an effective way of getting along with your neighbours.

Chris

Hey Susan, if you got my e-mail, just give me a ping. I'm always worried that I spelled the address wrong or something.

Wow, Chris, how did you manage to say pretty much all that needed saying in one sentence? I'll have to study up on your technique. ; )

I'm going to add, though--since I am inveterately loquacious--that another effective way to get along with your neighbors is to treat them like human beings rather than as defective vending machines whose buttons you push and whose panels you kick in hopes of getting them to cough up a candy bar without the bother of actually putting in some change. Which I guess is just repeating what Chris said.

Karen, thanks for the explanation.
Goodguyex, i haven't seen Matrix, just thought you used some vivid metaphors

My tongue hurts from all the biting of it I've done over the years. If that's the price I pay for civil relations with my neighbors, then I have only myself to blame/credit for it.

There are, of course, some neighbors with whom I couldn't care less that my relations are less than civil. Tongue pain should work both ways, in my book.